This new app wants to be your supermarket sat nav

Wednesday, November 09, 2016 - 03:19 PM

Being able to shop on our smartphones is now a very common thing, but physically navigating the supermarket can still be a stumbling block, especially when many of us are looking at shopping lists on our devices.

An app has now been created to provide navigation around supermarkets as we work through our shopping lists, with the aim of preventing the instances where customers find themselves looping back around to pick up something from the aisles you visited first.

Called Ubamarket, creator Will Broome said the idea came to him while having just that sort of experience.

“Four years ago something dawned on me. I wasn’t the only person in the supermarket with my head buried in my phone, staring at a shopping list that had been texted to me and wondering where to start,” he said.

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“Of course, when I did eventually get started, I embarked upon a journey that would have made an expedition across Middle Earth seem less complicated. Dictated to by my list as if in a trance, I would search item by item, aisle by aisle until I couldn’t find that one item which is impossible to find. Yep, that one! And I still haven’t found it, by the way.

“From aisle one to aisle seven, aisle three to aisle nine and then back to aisle one again because it turns out that the 17th thing on my list is located right next to the first thing on my list (who knew!?), my hapless journey continued.

“‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you walked in and your list was magically in the right order?’ I thought to myself, and Ubamarket was conceived. Right there on aisle nine.”

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The app itself enables users to enter their shopping list into the app, and with compatible stores will add the in-store location of the product to each item, reordering your shopping list accordingly so you can move between the aisles in the most efficient manner.

Users will also be able to use their smartphone camera to scan items as they go and check them off their list.

However, the app is still very much just a prototype, and has only one store – a Budgens in Gloucestershire – signed up to use it at the moment.